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Reviewer: Edward Breen
The Sistine Chapel Choir celebrate their musical heritage through a selection of Renaissance sacred music recorded inside the Sistine Chapel. Their programme includes works by Palestrina, and Allegri’s Miserere as preserved in the Sistine Codex of 1661. It is a beautifully recorded disc, as much a celebration of the building as of the music or the voices. They are a large ensemble, 30 ragazzi and 20 men with high tenors replacing falsettist-altos, and their performances favour low pitch, resulting in a richer timbre than English counterparts. At times they are reminiscent of Westminster Cathedral Choir under George Malcolm, but the trebles are more rounded.
The director, Monsignor Massimo
Palombella, takes a unique approach to polyphony driven partly by the acoustic,
which demands slower tempi than smaller professional ensembles favour, and
partly through a quest for ‘aesthetic relevance’. Interpretatively, this
frequently results in the opposite approach to prevailing norms: phrases bulge
expressively, surge to their apex and then slink down the other side, there are
occasional abbellimenti and a ‘dynamic’ tactus that promotes tempo
changes between sections. Such style traits seem to be driven from the top down,
with detail often lost among lower voices. Ultimately, it sounds like the
shifting affects of Baroque style rather than the graceful architecture of the
Renaissance, but it works. Occasionally there are baffling consequences, such as
at the accelerando in Palestrina’s Super flumina Babylonis on ‘dum
recordaremur tui, Sion’, but at other times it leads to extreme poignancy, such
as the opening of Anerio’s Christus factus est pro nobis. Mannered
singing may be out of favour among many professional ensembles but here it is
executed with such conviction that it creates one of the most expressive and
atmospheric recordings of this repertoire in recent years. |
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